Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Exception Which Tests the Rule

From normally well named Reason on line magazine comes this well thought out piece by Shikha Dalmia. But as good as it is, the essay contains these paragraph with one sour sentence within:

For two decades, progressives have castigated those questioning
global warming as "deniers."

But the Economist, once firmly in the alarmist camp,
recently acknowledged that global temperatures have remained
stagnant for 15 years even as greenhouse-gas emissions have
soared.

This may be because existing models have overestimated the
planet's sensitivity. Or because the heat generated is sinking to
the ocean bottom. Or because of something else completely.

Did you see it? The heat is sinking to the bottom of the ocean? What?

Warm ocean water is "lighter" than cold ocean water because it has thermally expanded and it has less salt in it. So the light floats on the dense and, like a piece of wood on any water, does not sink to the bottom unless it gets heavier than the water it displaces or has some outside force make it sink. εὑρίσκω!

So water warmed by the sun (that is, the first 100 feet or so from the surface down that visible light penetrates) does not sink unless it is forced down by subducting currents (downwelling) usually because of wind or the Ekman transport (whatever that is).

Warm water doesn't just sink into cold any more than ice held against your warm skin will warm you up.

The climate alarmists are desperate to account for the epic failure of their models vis a vis the recent 17 year halt in warming and (more recently) the last 11 years of actual cooling. It was one of the more famous, whistle-blower-leaked emails where climate alarmist Kevin Trenberth wrote: The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

Travesty is the right word for climate alarmism,
So the warming has to be at the bottom of the ocean where it slipped to past the 3000 Argo buoys undetected and in violation of the physical rules of Nature. It just has to be.

And this demented wish leaks out into otherwise normal thinking of people like Ms. Dalmia.

In his book Right Turns, Michael Medved tells a good story about his meeting Kerry with a friend and both of them were so turned off by Kerry's smug self satisfaction that thereafter they always parted with the warning, "Be careful, you don't want to wind up like John Kerry." Medved I think is a very perceptive guy.